Report: Hagel at top of list for defense secretary

Former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel has risen to the top of the list of candidates to become President Barack Obama’s next Defense secretary, according to reports Thursday, and could be nominated by the end of the month.

After weeks of rumblings in Washington that Hagel was on the short list, Bloomberg News reported that Hagel had cleared the White House vetting process and “was awaiting final word from the president.” White House spokesman Jay Carney declined comment on whether Hagel would get the nod.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters Thursday that he’d “read about” the potential nomination, but that he’d gotten no notice about it from the White House. Reid said he remembered their time in the Senate fondly.

"I enjoyed working with Chuck Hagel," he said, but he would not address a question about whether Hagel would be confirmed easily. “This is all up to the president,” Reid said. “Not to me."

Hagel, who represented Nebraska for two terms, would be Obama’s second Republican Defense secretary and that choice could agitate his left flank. “Democrats have a much deeper bench if they just take a look," suggested a former Defense official with ties to the Obama administration.

On the other hand, “That’s nonsense — you go for the best person. This should be above politics,” said Larry Korb, an assistant defense secretary under President Ronald Reagan and now a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Hagel, a Vietnam combat veteran, would be Obama’s third secretary of Defense. His first, Robert Gates, was held over from the George W. Bush administration. His second, Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman from California who was a budget director and White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, was moved over from the CIA, where he was director.

And now with Panetta, at 74, eager to return home to California, where he now spends most weekends, Hagel has surfaced as a top choice as a replacement, or for another key national security post, such as CIA director. He already serves as co-chairman of the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board and chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Board.

The only other Republican now in Obama’s Cabinet is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former Illinois congressman.

In many ways, Hagel is not your typical Republican.

In November, he endorsed Democrat and fellow Vietnam War veteran Bob Kerrey in his bid to return to the Senate from Nebraska. Still, Kerrey lost to state Rep. Deb Fischer.

As a senator in 2002, Hagel endorsed the resolution to authorize military action in Iraq, but he quickly became an outspoken critic of Bush’s handling of the war there.

During this presidential election, Hagel praised Obama for his foreign policy.

“I think President Obama has conducted a very responsible foreign policy,” Hagel told a local Nebraska radio station in November. “He’s gotten us out of one war. He’s getting us out of a second war. He hasn’t gotten us into any more wars. He’s gotten us in a situation where I think we are putting ourselves on a higher plane in the world in respect for this country. He did get [Osama] bin Laden. I think he’s using alliances more than ever.”

Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, said Hagel’s reputation as an independent thinker reminds her of Gates. “They’re two iconoclasts that don’t fit the Republican Party mold that we have now,” she said.

Still, she said, “polarization has gotten so much more extreme that a Republican Defense secretary buys you less than it did four years ago.”

Take, for instance, former Sen. Bob Dole’s recent appearance on the Senate floor to support a United Nations treaty that would ban discrimination against people with disabilities, she said. After paying their personal respects to the 89-year-old World War II veteran, in a wheelchair because of his frail health, Republicans overwhelmingly voted against the treaty.

“Republicans don’t buy you anything just by being Republicans anymore,” Hurlburt said.

On Capitol Hill, both Democrats and Republicans say they’d support Hagel if nominated and sent up for confirmation by the Senate.

Now that Susan Rice has withdrawn from State, President Obama should select Michele Flournoy for Defense. She's very capable and would be the first woman ever to head the Defense Dept. Plus as your article points out, selecting Hagel buys President Obama nothing with Congressional Republicans.

That Hagel has cleared the White House vetting process mean the he has, always, been a RINO? Must be, for if Chuckie boy was a staunch Republican the White House would never have accepted him as a candidate for any cabinet position let alone the critical and high profile on of Secretary of Defense.

Either that or we are faced, once more, with the truth that politicians are smarmy scum who float on the cesspool of Washington politics and, continually, pursue self-promotion and illicit rewards for being accommodating to those with power.